March 2011

I don't want to alarm anyone, but I'm gonna throw it out there: A tiny nation of haters is fixing to destroy us.

Just thought you should know.

I speak, I'm afraid, of North Korea, dear reader. Surprised? Maybe you thought Kim Jong-il had mellowed over time and was now doing what dictators everywhere do in semi-retirement: wearing chic sunglasses and supervising famines. Maybe you have a soft spot for North Korea and in your heart they'll always be "that little hermit nation."

In which case I bear bad news: They're back and scarier than ever.

Earlier this year they became, in Pentagonese, "a direct threat to the United States." In fact, they climbed a few notches up our Enemies List. Technically, they've gone from:

"axis of evil (member since 2002)"

to

"about to blow shit up"

Defense Secretary Robert Gates, a reliably glum Bush appointee and Obama keeper-on-er (who, let's face it, as SecDef, is literally paid to be a downer), announced that we had underestimated previous levels of North Korean craziness. His blunt and sobering forecast: The Koreans are secretly working on breakthrough space-age missiles that, in just a few years, could reach North America and start raining hellfire on our peace-loving lawns.

Really? North Korea? The one country more bankrupt than California? Led by a man who may or may not have had a debilitating stroke but is almost certainly gimpy? A place where they're still playing You-Sunk-My-Battleship submarino war games as if it were the Korean War? (Oh, that's right, it still is the Korean War.)

Yes, and according to Gates the missiles will be ready in five years, which it is my journalistic duty to report is soonish, almost certainly less time than it'll take to make The Hobbit.

Think about that. Five years! It was the specificity of the date—the thought of all those North Korean engineers furiously working on launcher codes, chugging imported cans of Four Loko, and studying GPS maps of Dresden, Ohio— that chilled my heart.

But then I thought: Haven't we been here before? (And aren't we still there?) Getting hot and bothered by a small despotic country with mysterious weapons of mass destruction? Meantime ignoring the larger and much-harder-to-neutralize threats around us?

Because the crazy thing is what was happening on the same day as Gates's fearfest—and what it means for the future of America. See, Gates made his announcement in Beijing while on a trip to ease tensions, which ended up with him getting publicly humiliated—no, played, like a cat's toy—by the Chinese. In one of the strangest acts of schizo-diplomacy I've ever seen, the Chinese welcomed Gates and then…proceeded to rub his face in shite and military might, to stage, for the first time in public, flight tests of their game-changing new weapon, their (shhh: previously top-secret) Star Wars-sounding, radar-eluding, long-range fighter jet, the J-20.

Gates never knew what hit him. He was supposed to meet with Chinese president Hu Jintao and talk about boring things like bilateral tensions and maybe grab a bilateral lunch. Instead, it was like:

"Yo, Hu, what's up?"

"Nothing. Just sitting here testing a sophisticated new breed of fighter jets. What's up with you?"

You want to know what else is weird? At first Hu Jintao didn't even know about the test! ("Oh, my God, was that today? The whole National Military-Flex Day to Ignite Fear Tremors in the American Imperialist Frenemy? Totally forgot about it!") The Chinese army didn't tell Hu about it. They don't have to! It may sound like a precarious way to run a giant country, but China's generals march to their own military tune and don't fall under civilian control—they don't have anyone like Robert Gates or Kim Jong-il bossing them around and telling them when it's cool to fire off top-secret weapons. So they can do, in a sense, what they want—and they're starting to want to do more. Like throwing their weight around Asia and bitch-slapping defense secretaries. The next week, the Chinese delivered another blow, no weapons necessary: Hu came to Washington and made a sweeping statement to The Wall Street Journal, declaring that the whole global currency system that revolves around the U.S. dollar—you know, the one where we get to run the world—is a "product of the past." Ouch.

My guess: Years from now, when they write the history books, which they will not do because they will only write history apps, they'll point to that day, Bob Gates's Very Bad Day, as the beginning of the Chinese Century, the day that sleeping giant started getting serious about flexing its muscles, and the rest of us started seeing a world where crazed North Korean dictators are nothing but a joke.

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